


A Softer Lovecraft

by ChocoChipBiscuit



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Kink Meme, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Romance, Oral Sex, Tentacle Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 11:44:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8400409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocoChipBiscuit/pseuds/ChocoChipBiscuit
Summary: In the years to come, the Mariner would watch the seas with heavy step, the fog rolling through the small town and permeating her lungs, shrouding her until she is as much a part of it as the sea itself, her borders blurring into the soft gray. No matter the chill, she would go out to face the icy blasts of wind, treating it all as the most salubrious of health spas; then again, if the rumors are to be believed, she has faced colder things. It would be easy to consign dark horrors to whispered tales on rainy nights and moon-shattered waves, but the town of Far Harbor knows what nightmares can walk the day, and can wear human shape before returning to the bottom of the sea to lip at long-ago civilizations.(or: a softer take on Lovecraft)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here on the Fallout kink meme](http://falloutkinkmeme.livejournal.com/7011.html?thread=20063331), and many thanks to ialpiriel for being a wonderful beta and enabler :)

In the years to come, the Mariner would watch the seas with heavy step, the fog rolling through the small town and permeating her lungs, shrouding her until she is as much a part of it as the sea itself, her borders blurring into the soft gray. No matter the chill, she would go out to face the icy blasts of wind, treating it all as the most salubrious of health spas; then again, if the rumors are to be believed, she has faced colder things. It would be easy to consign dark horrors to whispered tales on rainy nights and moon-shattered waves, but the town of Far Harbor knows what nightmares can walk the day, and can wear human shape before returning to the bottom of the sea to lip at long-ago civilizations.

Reality should have the grace to mimic fiction, allowing itself patterns of recognition that allow the sentient mind to foretell its narration.

(If any had asked the aesthetes of Vault 118, slumbering with immortal conscience within the metal carcasses of their mechanical existence, they might have guessed, foretold her coming with their troubled dreams and strange poetry, etched runic and polysyllabic in the fashion of elder times.

But no one asked, and they kept their dreams to themselves, expressed only through the unseen galleries of their creation.)

The Mariner knew none of this, of course. It was another low and foggy day, the air redolent with sea and fish and the ocean sucking at the docks with relentless hunger, when the ship arrived. It was a small vessel of tender care and an automatic navigation system dating to the prewar era, yet no less seaworthy for that. The woman commanding the vessel was of middling height, hair pulled back in a knot and her skin oddly sallow in the grey noon sun, glimmering with a small iridescence of salt and scale. She introduced herself with stiff formality as D—, though even the pale human imitation of it is better omitted lest it be taken as summons.

When Avery inquired as to the purpose of her trip, D— stated, “Family reunion,” and it was true, in a fashion. She did return the Nakano child to her loving parents, but it was as one lost child seeks another, one small torch cast against a profound darkness that threatens to consume all loss.

Regardless of her initial intentions, D— proved of great help to the peoples of Far Harbor, and collected a multitude of sobriquets and descriptors, ‘beauty’ being among the least of them. She was lovely, yes— alluring as an angler, the light that bids “come! come!” yet offers no succor. Far more compelling were the stories she brought from the mainland, small news of Diamond City and tattered editions of Publick Occurrences, and the most welcome realization that other radio stations have gone live— Radio Freedom, something stirring and welcome even as the classical music station passed into static senescence.

She purchased her scant supplies in town: bullets, some small items of healing, and a bottle of the harsh whiskey that works so well to keep the chill at bay.

Notably, she purchased no items of sustenance. When asked, she smiled with a broad display of excellent dentition, the harsh geometry of her face rearranging itself to something approaching warmth.

“I can feed myself,” she said simply.

And feed herself she did, returning from each venture with her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, the very picture of a most robust health. She sold and exchanged the spoils of each trip, though most notable were the trinkets of scale and bone. Though rudely fashioned, they held a unique charm of their own, fashioned into medallions and dangles that bore odd marks not unlike the scraping of teeth.

D— offered them to the Mariner in exchange for a kiss.

The Mariner accepted, tasting salt off her lips, the ocean’s spray and a strange and pungent sweetness under D—’s breath, a metal tang like rainwater and tin that sent shivers down her throat. D—’s long-fingered hands, cool to the touch, crept up the Mariner’s wrists, touching thumb to pulse as if in primitive worship, a fierce and possessive exultation that barely— barely!— kept itself in check before releasing her.

When the Mariner inquired, D— laughed, sharp as the finger-nail moon across a broken wave. “I have many hungers, and would not satisfy them all with you so soon.” A terrible affection in her voice, an ancient longing that sent timorous echo in the meat and gristle of the Mariner’s heart.

So the Mariner wore her beloved’s tokens in bangles, many-clattered cluster adorning her wrists in weird cacophony.

(And when she dreamed— the panegyric wailing of flutes would haunt her sleep, old rhythms and older patterns swimming to memory’s surface on bloody tides.)

D— reclaimed the Dalton family farm with an easy laugh, nearly a joke, commenting on the power of lineage and choosing one’s ground, blood binding the dweller to the soil. She fought the fog crawlers and mirelurks with a sharp-toothed smile, reminiscent of the monstrous fish washed ashore after the storm. Like many other sea-gifts, she was a blessing not unmingled with uneasy presence.

But of this the Mariner had no doubts, and would never waver, even when it brought her sanity into question: D— _was_ a blessing. As a daughter of the tides, as the daughter of daughters who built their lives along this jut of coast and rock, the Mariner was accustomed to the harsh vagaries of a life spent scrabbling for survival, holding to life by the merest sliver of chance. The Fog sang weird lullabies for sanity, but no less maddening than the storm-wail of the salt-rimed air or the knowledge that each and every day brought her one step closer to that final journey, the end of the Long Walk that no one else may travel in one’s stead, that immeasurable journey that she knew grew shorter by each passing hour.

(Is this a legacy? To build a Hull that cannot be breached, to wall out the monsters of a lifetime? Is this a legacy, to end one’s bloodline and transmute genealogy to substance, to pour one’s blood and salt into the very mortar of others’ defense? Salt-water cures all, in the end: sea, sweat, tears. But the cure is not always of the type we seek.)

When she finally told D— of her illness, her beloved grew pale and still, her lips thin and a strange and terrible light in her eyes. The moon reflected in shattered nacre off the filmy surface of her eyes.

“No. I will not allow it,” she said, as if it were so simple. As if disease would halt at one woman’s bidding, no matter how forceful her declaration.

“It’s not what you will allow, it’s what’s going to happen,” the Mariner said, not ungentle.

D— shook her head, scowling, flesh-puppet of her form warping strange shadows across the dock. “I will _not_ allow it.” As if she expected reality to reshape itself to her will.

(And perhaps it would, had D— harbored more of that ancestral call in her blood, had not the power of elder times grown dilute with passing generations. They had gained much to walk the planes of mortals without warping existence, but they lost much too. A sea-witch bargain.)

That night was the first that D— spent with the Mariner with more than fleeting touches or secretive kisses. She refused to be touched, but laid the Mariner’s glasses tenderly on the table and dove between the Mariner’s thighs with a single-minded ferocity. Her long tongue lapped in waves, strangely-jointed fingers gripped tight on the Mariner’s knees, a harsh labor of lips and teeth and the Mariner bit her lip until she tasted blood and salt and sea, the moon swimming behind her eyes and calling strange visions in the height of her frenzy.

When the Mariner lay herself to sleep, it was with the memory of waves, D—’s legs twined with hers and wrapping her in full-body embrace. D—’s skin was cool, her heartbeat slow, her breathing calm. The Mariner slumbered like a boat cradled in the body of the ocean, at the gentle mercies of forces beyond control or understanding.

They woke to the wan yellow light of early morning, a sulfurous fog. The air tasted of tin as the Mariner made toast, scraped a thick slab of butter across its face and washed it down with bitter coffee. D— refused, as always, and the Mariner asked why. When D— balked, obstinate, the Mariner thinned her lips, set her fists square on the table and demanded D— honor a dying woman’s request.

“Everything is dying,” D— said softly, lips cracked and hair limp as she finger-combed it before tying it back once more. “The stars are dying. The sun is in slow decline. Humans are but transient creatures on this planet.”

The Mariner snorted. “That’s no kind of answer. And rude, since I _am_ dying even if you stamp your feet about not ‘allowing’ it.”

D— smiled, wide, wide, as if to devour her own teeth. “I would rather not taint our limited time.” She shifted, restless in her skin, boots scraping the worn wooden floor. “I will make things right before I go.”

“Quit speaking riddles.”

D— gnawed her lip, tearing skin. “I was placed in the vault for study. As an… anomaly, of sorts. It delayed a long cycle that should have already happened.” Her nails on the table now, a deathwatch drag of her nails against the grain. “My people have always had a fondness for the foggy coast and the night. I owe my grandmother a visit, or… she will not be pleased. So I must hurry, before the stars shift alignment.”

“Will I get to meet your family?”

D— laughed like broken glass, green and glittering. “Pray you never do.”

More maddening questions in endless circle, like a snake devouring its tail. The Mariner learned no more of D—’s enigmatic progenitors, but instead told D— of the Red Death. A sailor’s haunt, the nightmare lurking on the storm’s edge in search of lost souls.

(As a sailor, the Mariner had learned much of boundaries; shore and wave, night and dawn. Never before considered what lurked beyond the lighthouses of the human imagining, what creatures exist beyond ‘human,’ or even ‘mortal.’)

So they set sail to end the horror haunting the cliffs, the gulls breaking sky with their beating wings and the boat slipping knife-like through the waves. D— looked to the horizon with pale face, equal parts fear and longing in her shadowed eyes, a white-knuckled grip on the railing.

“Scared?” the Mariner asked, voice soft with comfort as her heart beat tuneless panic against the cage of her ribs.

“Not of the Red Death,” D— said. “Or of dying. There are far worse fates.” Her eyes were flooded with shadow, bottomless and dark.

“Then what?”

“What you will think of me when this is all over.” A salt-damp tendril of hair had escaped its bun, and was tucked absently behind her ear.

“Why?”

“I have letters. Explanations, not excuses. But things that will make you question me unless you see them with your own eyes.”

A long silence, the Mariner standing beside her as the ship made land at the remote island.

Finally, she said, “I love you, but you don’t make it easy sometimes.”

D— smiled, her teeth long and sharp, and if the Mariner had known— but ah! She didn’t! Not yet, though she cursed herself later for rejecting her own eyes and assuming it a trick of dubious light.

(But later, she would think of how many days it had been since D— had eaten, and how primitive hungers chip at the civilized facade.)

The Red Death proved ignominious, a puny mirelurk of less than moderate size and whose red-lit gaze was lost in the dim light of day. It fell with a splash into shallow waters, bearing shells from both D— and the Mariner’s shotguns.

To reconcile nightmare with reality was not so easy, the terrors of a lifetime not so easily undone in one day.

But then they met Trappers in the Fog.

They had slipped alongside their boat from shore, on their own vessel. The Mariner cursed herself for not recognizing their ship, or for thinking that hungry Trappers would think of two secluded Harborfolk as anything but an opportunity. But as the Trappers stepped foot on surf, waves lapping at their boots as they raised their guns, D—’s face split into a terrible smile.

“Love, you may wish to avert your eyes,” she said.

The Mariner did not.

What followed defied description, though the Mariner would, in the years to come, struggle to make sense of it. Some would say that sanity seeks to preserve itself in the protective fog of forgetting, but it was difficult to find the horror in one’s beloved defending oneself against marauders.

(“She was not cruel,” the Mariner would insist, voice slurry with drink and her face flushed, a longing so fierce it gnawed bone. “She was— obeying her nature. There was no cruelty in it.”)

So here is what happened, as can best be recollected:

D— shed her human facade as a butterfly sheds the cocoon, her jaws disjointed wide as shadows crawled her features. The ocean was her ancestral homeland, and she stepped into it as if into a mother’s embrace, her hair falling into wild tentacles and her face one of madness. Eyes dark and bulging, her skin fine-scaled and shimmering opalescent as she seized the closest Trapper and ripped into him with knife-sharp teeth.

The Mariner did not remember them firing, but did recall finding spent shells scattered about them like primitive treasure, detritus like sea-glass or water-weed. Regardless, it bore no impact on D—, whom emerged hale and unbloodied after the conflict, her lips wet with blood and salt, the darkness receded from her eyes.

(But what do we truly fear? The darkness, or the creatures lurking in it? If at least one of those creatures mean us no harm, does that strip the darkness of its terror?

The ocean harbors many things, after all.)

“You did not avert your eyes,” D— said, picking bits of flesh from between her teeth.

The Mariner shrugged. “You see weird shit growing up on the island.”

“Before the war, most would have been horrified and sought asylum.”

“Before the war, you didn't have ghouls, Fog, or monsters prowling outside the settlements,” the Mariner said. “We don’t have the goddamn _luxury_ of growing mad with the realization.”

D— chuckled. “Ah. Yes.”

D— spoke more of her people and where she came from, of antediluvian civilizations lost beneath the waves, cyclopean architecture of non-Euclidean geometries and the moon’s pull on her psyche. The Mariner forgot much, being no historian or record-keeper, instead focused on the memories of her beloved rather than of a culture she had never seen and would never visit. So when scholars would ask of records, of art and history and the meanings behind the charms of bone and scale, the Mariner refused their questions from practicality, not obstinance, even if individuals like Jack Cabot would accuse her otherwise.

(If they had chosen other questions, and if she had deigned to answer, the Mariner could have told them this: the damp-stone feel of D—’s cold palm against her hand, the blue-green shimmer of the veins beneath her wrist. The way D— slipped into her native speech to form sounds beyond human imagining, syllables that had never been meant to be formed by a human tongue. Even ‘D—’ was but barbaric approximation of the name sung to D— by her star-mother within the ocean’s womb.)

But at its beating heart, the Mariner knew this: D— had to go. An ancient cycle had been disrupted by the Vault-Tec scientists, and the only reason they never reaped the rewards of their folly was because the atom bombs had consumed the world ere D—’s grandmother could wreak her vengeance, and the stars had slipped from alignment and sent her dead-dreaming back to sleep.

D— made her arrangements, giving a sealed bundle of letters to the Mariner and asking for safe delivery upon her departure. They left Far Harbor under the full moon, silver light cutting the waves to bone-sharp fragments as the Mariner set course for an unremarkable and unnamed spot out to sea.

“Is your grandmother so terrible?”

D— shrugged. “She is not— she is not evil. No more than a fog crawler is ‘evil.’ But her presence is not conducive to sanity.” She wet her lips, eyes gone fogged as she watched the moon. “I can pretend to be human, most days.” She let out a long sigh, breath forming dragons against the night. “She knows this world is precious to her children and her children’s children. So she sleeps beneath the waves, lest her dreaming tear away our small happiness.”

Then, as if they hit an unseen pivot, she turned to give her ghost-moon smile, stripping off her clothes to stand pale and naked beneath the moon’s pearly light. Her skin pebbled with cold, her nipples brown and dark. All the strange angles and geometries of her face, her long-fingered hands and the subtle proportions of her limbs, were stripped bare for the Mariner’s scrutiny. (“Like a carved figure, like— like someone trying to carve a ‘human’ without ever having seen one, like those old bestiaries where you know damn well the painter never saw a goddamn rhino,” the Mariner said, exasperated, as Jack Cabot inquired. Any more than that was “none of your goddamn business.”)

“Come with me into the water, and I can cure you,” D— said, and it must have been the bare night carving off the remnants of her humanity, the fleeting terror of the stars shifting once more and the whisper-madness tickling the backs of their skulls, but the Mariner felt that ancient and terrible call in her bones. D—, for all her kindnesses, was struggling to damp the ancient powers in her blood to make this last gift a gift of choice, freely taken, rather than something thrust upon the Mariner.

But the Mariner nodded, made her choice, and slipped into the waves without ripple.

Once underwater, the moon disappeared, swallowed in clouds of ink as the Mariner felt herself drifting, limbless, bodiless, in that eternal darkness. Though submersed she felt no chill, felt no rasp of air in her lungs— as if her very functions were suspended in that amniotic warmth. D— had gone bodiless and strange, from human masquerade to a creature only vaguely reminiscent of form. D—’s hair and face melted together in a shadow-drip of shape, her arms wrapped in tentacled embrace.

No space for words, no air for speech— but in the fashion of the great star-mother who whispers in dreams, the Mariner felt D— speak mind-to-mind. Even less human now than before, the glimpse of a great and alien consciousness that knew precious little of humanity, that had existed in the universe long before the first creatures that might become human had emerged from the sea, and that would continue existing long after the creatures that humans might become have perished and their homes burnt to a planetary husk.

“ _I love you. Live long. Live well. Live happy. It is natural to feel small against the immense darkness of the sky, but that is no reason to give up. There is comfort and joy in the smallness. Humans live on placid islands of ignorance amidst the black seas of infinity— so enjoy your island.”_

(This is not verbatim what D— spoke to her, but as best a transcription of a wordless communication that the Mariner could write in her personal journals.)

“I would rather enjoy you,” the Mariner spoke, or tried to speak, the water filling her mouth and not even air enough to bubble as she moved her lips. Through the buoyant cushion of the water she pressed her hand to D— ‘s shadows, an incorporeal darkness nevertheless with substance, warm and yielding.

And upon a thousand kisses, the tentacled blackness creeping over her with the most minute of suctions, D— held her, slipped a sinuous curve under the Mariner’s sweater to twine about her breasts, strong and warm. A gentle limb of impossible strength, the Mariner held in a loose circle of Medusa-like tendrils that swayed, undulating, an endless embrace of smooth muscle and soft touch, a plush and never-ending darkness.

More thoroughly blinded than by any night, the Mariner allowed herself to enjoy the sway of D— ‘s tentacles, the fleshy warmth of them creeping under her clothes, twining through the clasp of her bra and under the panel of her boxers. More of those bubble-like pluckings against her skin, a whisper without friction. A whisper-hint of pressure over her hardened clit, like a tiny tongue pushing against her, an oceanic fullness as a thicker tentacle pressed against her entrance, and there was that great-thought silence of hesitation from D— before the Mariner nodded— _yes, yes, yes,_ thinking at full volume— and it slipped inside her, thick and gentle, and it _moved_ , her body swaying with the pulsing tides of D— ‘s body, her head swimming in ocean scent, her body gone to water and merged with the frothy waves of desire, longing—

The Mariner came in that vast and expansive darkness, cried out and was held by D— as she drifted through a dream-fugue of sleep and exhaustion.

“When will you come back?” the Mariner said, or perhaps thought, at last.

D— answered with a vast and tender kindness, like a blanket of stars. "When the stars are right."

"And when is that?"

"Not for another century, my love."

The Mariner groaned, sagging heavy and weightless in the warm swell of the sea. "Well, shit. Here's hoping I go ghoul."

The heart takes its time to say goodbye, and the best medicine is slumber.

When at last the Mariner woke, dry and dreaming on the deck of her boat, the moon had set and the sun was barely starting to rise.

The people of Far Harbor greeted the Mariner with joy and surprise, citing a terrible storm and quake the night before, of which the Mariner had been completely unaware.

The Mariner took D—’s letters and meticulously followed their instructions without opening them— letters to be sent to her acquaintances in the Commonwealth, various figures of import such as famed journalist Ms Piper Wright of the Publick Occurrences, or General Preston Garvey of the Minutemen. One letter was burnt rather than sent, a dark and greasy smoke rising at the shrine of the Children of Atom. Whatever Mother it may reach, the Mariner was sure received the message regardless.

Any Island child knows this— the world is vast and hostile, filled with cosmic indifference and flesh-hungering abominations. Terrors can walk at any hour of the day.

But in our small ways and in our small connections, we tame that awesome darkness into a gentle night.

And the Mariner lived long, lived well, and lived happy. And on certain nights when the stars were right, she dreamed of her lover beneath the sea.


End file.
